The final frontier for privatisation: schools

As
in the NHS, the government’s structural changes to schools are just
the start of a massive privatisation process.

Mossbourne Community Academy, London, wikimedia

‘The
dramatic expansion of the academies programme’ represents a
‘dramatic shift of power from the old educational establishment’.

So
said
Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, a whole year before last week’s
‘dramatic’, although far less antagonistic, announcement that all
schools are to be forced into becoming non-state, education
providers.

Hang
on, though. She wasn’t finished.

‘Now,
with those foundations laid, we need that same determination; that
same pioneering spirit; and that same clarity of vision to embrace
and shape the next stage of our reform programme.’

What?

The
removal of the state from the provision of education isn’t peak
privatisation? There’s more?

The
next stage of the government’s reforms, Morgan is ‘convinced’,
has education technology ‘at its heart’.

It
goes something like this:

Step
one: take responsibility and resources out of the hands of the public
sector and hand it to unaccountable privately-managed companies.

Step
two: private providers accelerate the use of technology in schools in
order to 'improve cost efficiency’, as leading academy chain, ARK,
put it.

The
second reform phase has as much to do with privatisation as the
first.

There’s
not much that schools provide that can’t be improved (according to
tech interests) with technology. Even the development of children’s
social and emotional skills offers an opportunity for ed-tech firms,
says a recent report
by management consultants, Boston Consulting Group.

Reducing
teacher workload is one of the ‘sells’, and the government’s
teacher ‘workload challenge’ launched this week could be seen in
this context. Rather than employing
more teachers,
and reducing class sizes, technology – and tech-literacy in
teachers – is being pitched as a solution to the current workload
crisis (see the case studies on the ‘challenge’ blog, here,
here
and here).

Last
year, $500m was invested in US ed-tech firms focused on
‘transforming’ schools. Alongside the venture capitalists, big
name corporates have been throwing money at ed-tech: Google,
Facebook, Pearson, Microsoft and Apple.

It’s
not just global, tax-lite tech companies that have gone frothy at the
mouth over edtech, though. The UK government is backing it as a
lucrative export. Its 2013 Industrial
Strategy for Education
set out an ambition for the UK to be a world leader in education
technology. The strategy launch was held just round the corner from
Whitehall, at the HQ of the ‘world’s leading education company’,
Pearson.

‘Technology...
underpins the growth of multinational education companies,’ says
the government. It sees its role as ‘facilitating’ that growth
and actively ‘stimulating innovation’.

This
is what that looks like. In January this year, at the Education
World Forum
conference in London, which the UK government hosts and the ed-tech
industry sponsors, education ministers and officials from 91
countries (representing over 80 per cent of the world’s population)
gathered with Nicky Morgan to discuss the future of education...
before being marched by British officials to the Excel Centre for the
UK’s enormous ed-tech trade show, BETT...
and the hard sell.

What
UK policy-makers, Pearson and the tech giants have their eye on is
the global education technology market, or rather the slice of the
$5trn global education budget that can be diverted to technology.
‘People don’t realize how big it is’, said a Pearson
representative at a recent ‘education investor’ conference in
London. There are ‘hugely exciting times ahead’.

Consultancy
giant, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which is heavily involved in
education system reform, has put a figure on it. It estimates that
the ‘connected education’, or ed-tech, market ‘will grow at
around 32 per cent annually over the next 5 years and, by 2020, will
be worth almost $446 billion globally.’

The
growth of ed-tech ‘raises a number of questions around the
preparedness of the sector’, writes PwC’s Chris Kirk in an essay
on ‘Managing Teacher Supply – a Strategy for a Digital Age’,
which features in a report – The
Importance of Teachers
– published earlier this month by the free-market think tank,
Policy Exchange. ‘What will be the implications of this growth –
particularly for the supply of teachers,’ he asks. Will
technological change, which he sees as inevitable, have a positive
impact on the profession?

Will
teachers, for example, embrace ‘virtual classrooms’, where a
teacher no longer needs to be physically present in the classroom. As
Kirk writes: ‘One could imagine that such a model could be used to
support regions of the UK where recruiting from a dwindling pool of
teachers is becoming increasingly challenging.’

(Note
1: Kirk is at pains to point out that ed-tech isn’t just a solution
to teacher shortages and will benefit pupils too: ‘It is remarkable
that something that was once the preserve of the wealthy – access
to new innovations in technology – is creating an opportunity for
affordable access to another previously elitist resource –
personalised, high quality teaching.’ This is the same Chris Kirk
that told a private gathering of UK education reformers just a few
years ago: ‘The evidence on technology raising learning [standards]
in a traditional setting is quite weak... The evidence on learning
only using technology is quite strong. It’s not a particularly
great idea.’)

(Note
2: PwC isn’t necessarily a disinterested observer of these reforms.
At the same private education reform gathering in 2012, a
representative of PwC outlined a service it had developed to partner
with groups of newly created academies to provide back-office
functions, which it called a ‘schools solution for sharing’.
Unlike public sector ‘sharing solutions’, however, this service
would be provided on a for-profit basis. ‘PwC isn’t spending all
this money for the hell of it,’ said the PwC rep regarding the
investment the firm had made in developing the service: ‘We see
this as a great opportunity.’)

(Note
3: The gathering was hosted by James O'Shaughnessy, now Lord
O'Shaughnessy, a central reform figure in the UK, now free-school
operator. He believes that academy chains will open branches abroad
and become another education export. O'Shaughnessy is a graduate of
Policy Exchange, the think tank formerly chaired by Michael Gove,
funded by countless academy sponsors and undisclosed others, and
which provides a nursery for so many of the UK’s education
reformers. For years it has pushed for the radical reform of
England’s education system on market-based principles, including
advocating profit-making schools).

“It is ‘the final frontier of a number of sectors once
under public control that have either voluntarily opened” or “been
forced” to open up to private enterprise”

In
investment terms, education is ‘the
big enchilada’,
according to one US investment firm. It is ‘the final frontier of a
number of sectors once under public control that have either
voluntarily opened” or “been forced” to open up to private
enterprise, wrote its analysts.

Opening
up a ‘resistant’ schools market

Schools,
though, have yet to fully embrace technology at anything like the
scale that some tech interests would like to see.

This
is less true, however, for privately-operated schools. In the US,
charter schools – equivalent to our academies – are seen as
leading on technology. ‘Charter schools often leverage new and
promising technologies’, says leading ed-tech firm (and BETT
exhibitor), Knewton.
More than this, Charter Management Organisations (CMOs) – the US
equivalent of our Multi-Academy Trusts – are described as ‘ideal
first customers for ed-tech entrepreneurs’, providing ‘fertile
ground for innovation.’

Put
another way, a publicly controlled school sector is seen as a barrier
to technology. The private sector is seen as a much more willing
buyer. Right up until this week’s announcement, the UK was seen as
having ‘a
resistant schools market’.

Another
‘driver of change’ in favour of ed-tech, according to one major
US ed-tech investment firm, is the ‘evolving teacher base’. ‘With
a teacher retirement bubble coming in the next five years,’ it
writes referring to the US, ‘we believe the new teacher base will
be younger and will include more career switchers, both of which are
generally more tech-savvy and forward thinking.’

If
the creation of a schools market and a less-experienced workforce are
seen as increasing the uptake of technology in schools, technology is
also seen as a way of accelerating the marketisation of education.

As
two US advocates, John Chubb and Terry Moe of the conservative Hoover
Institution write in their 2009 book, Liberating
Learning: ‘Technology
is destined to resolve the political problem that has prevented
reformers from taking effective action. To put it simply: the seepage
of technology into the system –
which cannot be stopped and will continue – works slowly and
inexorably to undermine the political power of the teachers unions.
With their power to resist weakened over time, the floodgates will
then be opened.’

(Before
dismissing this as a case of over-zealous American Right optimism,
England’s former education secretary, Michael Gove described
Liberating Learning –
a genuinely
disturbing book – in a 2012 speech as ‘excellent’, before in
the next breath pronouncing
that the ‘wondrous world of technological innovation will see
children’s learning ‘liberated from the dead hand of the past’,
quoting the authors.)

Restructure
and the rest will follow

The
structural changes to the English school system, announced last week,
could do away with a lot of this resistance to ‘innovation’.

Like
the structural changes to the NHS, the government’s school reforms
will hand more control to the private sector. Across both sectors,
increasingly it will be unaccountable private interests that get to
say how these multi-billion pound budgets are allocated.

This
is not how it was pitched to us.

The
NHS reforms were sold to us as empowering GPs. ‘The whole
point of
our NHS reforms,’ said David Cameron, is ‘to put the power in the
hands of local doctors, so that they make decisions based on what is
good for their local area.’

Likewise,
Nicky Morgan said last week: ‘We need to put our trust into the
hands of the people that know best how to run our schools – the
teachers – and the academy system does just that.’

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